WAAP:Brad Phillips-Still Life With Hard Feelings

This Thursday:Will Aballe Art Projects is pleased to announce Still Life with Hard Feelings, a new digital print edition by Vancouver-based artist, Brad Phillips. WAAP will be releasing 30 limited edition prints signed and numbered by the artist. Since 2001, Phillips has produced watercolor paintings, oil paintings, drawings, and photographs that often recast classical tropes in painting through a contemporary aperture. Balancing sadistic, literary wit with emotional, post-ironic authenticity, Phillips’s images function as self-reflexive observations that mirror the precariousness of the quotidian world.

Still Life with Hard Feelings is Phillips’s aggressive translation of the nature morte tradition. In this image, the artist presents the terminal moment of a blood red carnation, pinned at the throat by a dagger. The stark background and hard shadow emphasize the artificiality and theatricality of the death of this figure: rather than depicting the demise of the botanical as an inevitable process of decay, it is, instead, an act of crude murder.